Alone a bone secrets nov.., p.7
Alone (A Bone Secrets Novel), page 7
Ray slipped on his sports jacket over his long-sleeved peach Polo shirt. Mason eyed his own wrinkled jacket on the back of his chair and decided to skip it. He followed Ray down the hallway and into the same interview room where they’d talked to Simon.
A man paced the small room as the detectives stepped inside. His hands were clamped behind his back, his shoulders stooped, and his face set with heavy lines that spoke of a life of stress. His hair was a pure white, but his eyebrows were thick and black. Old-man brows. Coarse and spiny. Mason made a mental note to check his own brows when the interview was over. Usually Ray was good about letting him know if he was looking straggly. Ray noticed things like that.
The man eyed them from under the thick brows. His dark gaze assessing. He stepped forward and held out a hand. “Lorenzo Cavallo.”
He pegged Lorenzo’s age at late seventies. His speech was thickly accented. The detectives both shook hands and introduced themselves. Mason gestured at the chairs and Lorenzo sat heavily, sighing. He had an old manila envelope that he set on the table before him. Mason eyed it as he and Ray sat.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Cavallo?” Ray asked.
“Lorenzo, please. I heard on the news this morning about those young women they found in the forest.” Lorenzo met Mason’s gaze.
Mason nodded but said nothing.
“The newscasters talked about women who’d been found the same way there a long time ago.” Lorenzo lay a gnarled hand on his envelope but didn’t open it. “They’re saying these young women had long black hair like the women did back then. And that no one had ever identified three of the women from before.”
Mason kept his mouth shut. If Lorenzo was fishing for information, he wasn’t going to get it from him.
The old man moved his gaze to his envelope, his finger toying with a ripped corner. Mason noticed the envelope was weathered and thin at the edges. It’d lived in someone’s storage for a long time.
“My family moved here when I was twenty. There were eight of us. My parents and my younger four sisters and brother. We didn’t speak English. Us children picked it up pretty quickly. My parents not so much. They eventually learned enough to get by, but either kept to themselves or socialized with other Italian-speaking families. There weren’t many of us in the city back then.”
“You lived in Portland?” Ray asked. “And you came from Italy?”
Lorenzo nodded but still kept his gaze and hand on the envelope. Mason noticed he wore a plain gold band on his left hand. He had working man’s hands, the nails short and stained. The stain looked permanent.
“My father opened a garage. He knew automobiles. Especially Italian ones, but there weren’t many of those here. He learned the American autos very quickly and gained a reputation as an honest man.”
Mason looked at Lorenzo’s nails again. Auto grease?
“My brother and I worked in his shop. We did well.”
Mason mentally patted himself on the back.
“One of my sisters did the books. The other girls were much younger and stayed home with my mother.” Lorenzo paused, his lips pressed tight as if they were reluctant to pass on the words. “My youngest sister, Lucia, was a disappointment to the family.”
What the hell did that mean? Mason raised a brow but kept his jaws shut.
Lorenzo opened and closed his mouth a few times as he tried to phrase his next sentence. “I was gone, you understand, by the time she was grown. I had a family and had moved south to open a garage in Medford. I didn’t pay mind to my parents’ complaints about her wild ways. I thought they just didn’t understand young people, especially American young people. My sisters wanted to be American teens. They wanted to dress and speak like the others they went to school with. My parents struggled to keep up.”
Here it comes.
“Lucia had been gone for two weeks by the time my mother told me she’d left. She didn’t want me to know. My father was humiliated that his daughter had left him, and he wrote her off, declared she was dead to him. She had a boyfriend and had been out late a few times, but she’d never vanished before. According to my mother, her battles with my father were epic screaming matches. My mother sent her to live with my aunt for a while, hoping she’d settle down and get along with my father when she returned. It didn’t work. They fought worse. One day she left, swearing she wasn’t returning. And she never did.”
Lorenzo looked at Ray then at Mason. “I saw the old photos, grainy from the newspaper, on the news today. I’d never heard of the deaths before. I guess we lived too far away. Medford was very small and a good distance from the big city of Portland.”
“Surely your parents or siblings heard of the women’s deaths and wondered if one was Lucia,” said Ray.
Lorenzo shrugged. “To them, she wasn’t missing. She’d left. My parents never spoke of her again.”
“But what about your siblings? Your sisters had to wonder what happened?”
Lorenzo gave a sad smile. “You don’t know my father. If he said Lucia was dead to the family, then she was. My sisters may have wondered where she went, but as far as the few discussions I’ve had with them, they’ve always assumed she’d formed a new life elsewhere.”
“No one looked for her? No one asked questions?” Ray sounded flabbergasted.
Lorenzo shook his head. “If they did, I didn’t know about it. I had my own family to deal with. Five boys,” he added proudly.
Mason wanted to punch the old man. Holy shit. What kind of family lets a sister vanish and not ask questions?
When’s the last time you talked to your brother? Fuck that. Mason knew his brother was alive and ornery as ever in Washington.
“So you’re wondering if one of the women in the past was your sister,” Mason stated.
Lorenzo nodded. “The descriptions match. The date matches. Lucia vanished two weeks before the estimated date of those deaths.”
“You remember the date your sister left?” Ray asked, one brow rising. Mason had caught the same inconsistency in the man’s story. If he hadn’t been around and had brushed off his sister’s disappearance, why did the date stick in his head?
Lorenzo fiddled with the envelope. “She left on my father’s birthday.”
Mason nodded. No doubt the father took that very personally and frequently commented on the disrespect. Sounded like something his old man would have done.
Scowling, Lorenzo shoved the envelope across the table to Mason. Mason wondered what kind of relationship he’d had with his father. An immigrant with old country values, trying to survive and keep his history in a new world.
“Those are the only pictures I have of Lucia. They are old, of course. Perhaps there are photos of the dead that were not released to the public. Maybe you have something else that you can compare them to.”
“Our best bet would be a DNA sample,” said Ray. “We still have the skeletal remains of the women. They can extract DNA and create a comparison.”
Lorenzo stared at Ray, his mouth opening slightly, his face flushed. “They were never buried? No prayers said over them?”
Mason shifted in his seat. He wasn’t religious, but he tried to respect the beliefs of others. “Uh… no. No one knew who they were, let alone their religion. They were kept in the hopes that someday their mystery could be solved.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve already got one of the best forensic anthropologists in the country examining them, looking for identity indicators that our predecessors may have missed or not had the knowledge of.”
Lorenzo leaned back in his chair, nodding. Mason could tell the lack of interment upset him, but he’d understood the reasoning.
“Do you remember if Lucia ever broke any bones?” Ray asked, his pencil poised over his notebook. “Or any unusual characteristics about her teeth? I’ll get a tech in here to take a cheek swab for DNA if you consent. That will get things moving in the right direction. It can take a few weeks to get results.”
Lorenzo gestured at the envelope. “You can see her teeth. I don’t remember if any of my sisters ever broke bones. And yes, I’ll do the DNA testing.”
Mason unfolded the flap of the envelope. It smelled old. Like a bookstore full of used books. He shook the contents out onto the table. Three black-and-white photos slipped out, yellowed and faded with age. Two were small photos with thick white borders. They were family pictures, informal groupings with two adults and six children clustered together. Mason glanced at them and quickly discarded them; the faces were too small. The large school photo was the one he wanted. A beautiful girl met his scrutiny; her strong will shining from her eyes. Oh, yes. I bet you gave your father hell. The picture was a formal school shot with her hair in the popular bouffant style of that decade. Dark eyes, dark hair, and distinctively crooked upper front teeth.
Score.
Mason’s day brightened. Victoria Peres and Lacey Campbell were going to love the photo.
Victoria opened the back of her vehicle to unpack her gear, feeling clear of the stress of yesterday. Last evening, all the girls had been identified. It’d been a dreadful day, but when the last girl was confirmed, she’d wanted to weep from the relief. Trinity’s friend, Brooke, was the girl fighting for her life in a hospital bed. Brooke’s parents had returned from a night at the beach to find their daughter near death. But they were the lucky parents.
Dr. Campbell had slowly gone through the questionnaires, eliminating the obvious and setting aside the possibles. It’d narrowed down to nine missing girls who fit the general descriptions. Victoria had heard the other three missing girls had eventually made their way home. All three had spent the night and day with friends, either deliberately avoiding communicating with their parents or blaming dead cell phones.
The five dead girls were beautiful. Victoria and Lacey had looked at their school photos, tears streaming down their faces at the sight of the life and energy that leaped from the pictures. What a waste. Each attended a different local high school, but they all were cut from the same cloth. Vibrant, healthy, cheerful young women, whose parents all swore their daughters had no desire to kill themselves.
It matched what Trinity had said about Brooke. These were girls looking forward to dates next week and college next year.
Someone poisoned them.
Someone deliberately destroyed that beauty and vivaciousness and put it on display for the world.
Victoria was determined to help find out who.
Today she’d woken up with excess energy to burn. She’d been lucky this morning. The sky had been clear for rowing practice, and she hadn’t felt a drop of moisture. Well, except from the paddles of the other rowers. Late fall was a crazy time for dragon boat drills, but she loved it. The rowing workout was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. When the days were clear, like it had been this morning, there was no better place to be than on the Willamette River.
It helped clear her head of sorrow. And anger.
For the past two years, she’d been a part of various dragon boat teams. Occasionally she went out of town for a competition if someone begged her, but she didn’t do it to compete; she did it to get out of the house and morgue and be on the water. This morning’s two-hour practice had flown by. The air was crisp and cold, and the river was high with the heavy rains from the last two weeks. Lots of rain meant debris on the river, and it stirred up the water into a muddy brown no matter how blue the sky was. When ample rain worked its way from streams and tiny rivers into the Willamette River on its way to the Columbia River and then the Pacific Ocean, it made for treacherous rowing.
Victoria loved the challenge. There was something about being at the water’s level and seeing the city and riverbanks from a turtle’s-eye view. Mount Hood seemed taller, city skyscrapers seemed mightier, and she simply felt vulnerable and alive. When you spend every day studying the remains of death, getting out into the living elements of the world was essential.
Her next-door neighbor had introduced her to the dragon boats. She and Jeremy had bonded over local wines and his golden retriever when she’d moved into the neighborhood after her split with Rory. Victoria wasn’t one to get to know her neighbors, but Jeremy had inserted himself in her life and she’d meekly acquiesced. The seventy-year-old was a force to be reckoned with. Gray-haired, marathoner-lean, and proudly flaming gay. She’d never met anyone like him and had instantly adored him.
He’d dragged her to the dragon boat practices one year when she’d been running herself ragged at work. She’d weakly protested, not wanting to hurt the kind man’s feelings, but he’d overruled her. It’d been exactly what she needed. She’d always been a work-out-at-home type of exerciser. She had an elliptical and a treadmill and ran outside when weather permitted. But getting her out on the river in a boat with nineteen other excited rowers had created an addiction.
“Hey, how was the water today?” Jeremy’s voice sounded behind her.
Victoria hit the automatic close button on her X5 and faced the man, studying him for signs of worsening health. Jeremy hadn’t rowed at all this season. He’d struggled with bronchitis and pneumonia, and she hated to see him as a shell of the vigorous man he’d been six months before. His face was thinner, his movements slower, but his eyes sparkled with life. It was that life that had drawn her to him. He shared it with everyone.
He looks a little better.
Jeremy was usually so spirited; it killed her to see him struggle. She’d never known a grandfather, but she wished she’d had one like Jeremy. He shared his positive energy; he didn’t suck it out of others. Victoria had spent too much time with people who left her drained. Jeremy did the opposite.
“Clear and cold,” she answered.
His eyes lit up. “In other words, perfect.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fabulous. I’m going to try to get out there next week.”
Victoria shook her head. “No. That’s too soon. I don’t want to see you relapse.”
Gray eyebrows narrowed in a playful glare. “You’re not my doctor. And I really am feeling better. Was out running errands all day yesterday and even took in a concert the evening before.”
Victoria smiled. “Good! I’m glad to see you’re coming around. Everyone misses you on the water.”
“Ah, they just want someone who does all the work for them. You’ve been busy, I see. Those girls were all over the television yesterday, and you’re all over the paper today.”
“What?” Victoria froze.
“Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.” He held up the newspaper. “You’re on the front page of the metro section.”
Victoria tried not to snatch the paper from his hand. She hated publicity. And the thought of herself in the paper was making her stomach spin. She unfolded the paper and stared at an old photo of herself. It was from a lecture she’d given a few years back at Portland State University. She breathed a small sigh of relief. The Oregonian had used the photo before. That meant they didn’t have anything fresh from the current investigation. The headline read BONE LADY TACKLES OLD MYSTERY.
Not the Bone Lady moniker again.
Surely the papers could come up with a better name. She skimmed the article. It stated that she was taking a fresh look at the old bones from the original circle of women and briefly rehashed the story. She glanced at the byline. Not Michael Brody. Brody wrote better articles than this; this article said nothing. Brody wrote in-depth investigative articles. She wondered if he was examining the case for the paper. He was a close friend of Lacey Campbell’s, and had crossed paths with Victoria a few times. He knew how to push her buttons in a highly irritating way and seemed to enjoy it.
“So you’re looking into that old case, eh?”
She looked up. Jeremy studied her closely, and she wondered what her face had revealed. Irritation? Annoyance?
“Yes. I’m hoping to find something that will indicate who those unidentified three women were.”
“I remember when that happened. I always thought it was odd that no one stepped forward.”
She looked at him with new interest. “You lived in the city back then?”
“Sure. Lived right downtown. It was a different era, you know. Men like me did our best to stay out of the limelight, but we knew where to go to socialize with others like us.”
Victoria studied his face. They’d had a few conversations about what it was like to be a gay man in today’s society, but Jeremy rarely talked about the old days. Her heart winced in sympathy for the hidden life he’d led.
“We used to talk about that case a lot. Who would murder a bunch of women? Rumors swirled about white slaves and prostitution rings. I always thought it seemed like it had a personal touch. Like someone had arranged them in that circle, you know, put them on display for others to see.”
“But why weren’t all of them claimed?”
“Maybe folks were too scared to do so. It had that cult-like feeling about it, you know? Something about them being found in a pattern and dressed the same.”
Victoria shook her head. Could a cult have hid underground for that many decades in the city?
“I see all the recent girls have been identified.” Jeremy nodded at the paper still in Victoria’s hands. She handed it back to him, gladly closing the paper on her own photo. “All local girls, but different schools, eh?”
Victoria nodded. “You know Trinity, right? The girl who ended up in the hospital is a close friend of hers.”
“Ah, she’s a good one, that girl. How’s Trinity holding up?”
“She was relieved Brooke lived, but now is terrified she’ll die. She spent most of yesterday believing she’d already died.”
“It says they didn’t figure out who was who until late last night. Were you down there?”
“For a while. It was a nightmare. Lots of parents searching for their kids. Dr. Campbell narrowed it down pretty fast.”
“All this new technology, but teenagers still learn the quickest way to hide crap from their parents.” Jeremy snorted. “Some things never change. And they’re always willing to follow the person who seizes control of their crowd, applying the peer pressure. Usually to their detriment.”
